Abstract

The literature base on teacher effectiveness has rapidly expanded in the past decade. Once dominated by social scientists, the literature is now heavily influenced by economists. Utilizing value-added modeling, economists have mainstreamed attempts to isolate the effect that a teacher has on student achievement. Findings from these attempts, however, confuse an improvement in measuring teachers with an improvement in measuring teaching. The field of education is still missing transparent, debatable measures of teaching practices. This study proposes a new measure, the adjusted whole-group discussion score, for one teaching practice—conducting whole-group discussions. It then uses that measure on a purposefully sampled group of teachers, and investigates its relationship to statistically derived measures of teacher effectiveness—that is, value-added estimates. This study is one of the first to go inside the classrooms of teachers being labeled effective through value-added modeling and to shed light on their classroom practices. In so doing, the study highlights different aspects of good teaching, which include being accountable to facts and procedures and being accountable to authentic discourse. Moreover, it articulates specific classroom discussion moves that can be used in targeted interventions. Findings illustrate that teachers with similar value-added scores can have markedly different teaching practices and that high value-added estimates do not necessarily reflect a full range of classroom teaching practices. The main policy implication of these findings is that, similar to students who need individualized instruction, teachers need individualized intervention.